spend a day a very long way
from the windmill in a pretty little Algerian town.... It will be a
nice change from the tambourines and cicadas....

... There's rain in the air; the sky is grey; the crests of Mount
Zaccar are enveloped in fog; it's a miserable Sunday.... I'm in my
small hotel room, lighting one cigarette after another, just trying to
take my mind off things.... The hotel library has been put at my
disposal. I find an odd volume of Montaigne between a detailed history
of hotel registrations and a few Paul de Kock novels. Opening it at
random, I re-read the admirable essay on the death of La Boetie.... So,
now I'm more dreamy and gloomy than ever.... A few drops of rain are
starting to fall, each one leaving a large star in the dust accumulated
on the windowsill since last year's rain.... The book slips out of my
hands, as I stare hypnotically at the melancholy star for some time....

The town clock strikes two on an old _marabout_ whose slender, high,
white walls I can see from here.... Poor old marabout. Thirty years
ago, who would have thought that one day it would have a big municipal
dial stuck in its solar plexus, and on Sundays, on the stroke of two,
it would give a lead to the churches of Milianah, to sound their bells
for Vespers?... There they go now, ringing away.... And not for a brief
spell, either...

Without doubt this room is a miserable place. The huge, dawn spinners,
known as philosopher's thought spiders, have spun their webs
everywhere.... I'm going out.

* * * * *

I'm on the main square, now. Just the place for the military band of
the Third Division, not put off by a bit of rain, which has just
arranged itself around the conductor. The Brigade General appears at
one of the Division windows, surrounded by his fancy women. The
sub-prefect is on the square and walks to and fro on the arm of the
Justice of the Peace. Half a dozen young Arabs, stripped to the waist,
are playing marbles in a corner to the sound of their own ferocious
shouting. Elsewhere, an old Jew in rags comes to look for a ray of
sunshine he left here yesterday and looks astonished not to find it....
"One, two, three...!" the band launched into an old Talexian mazurka,
which Barbary organs used to play, irritatingly, under my window last
year. But it moved me to tears today.

Oh, how happy are these musicians of the third! Their eyes fixed on the
dotted crochets, drunk on rhythm and noise, only